


Dirt (Klaine Advent Day Four)

by marauder_in_warblerland



Category: Glee
Genre: Klaine Advent Drabble Challenge 2013, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 12:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauder_in_warblerland/pseuds/marauder_in_warblerland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the minutes after Karofsky leaves the locker room, Kurt can only do one thing at a time. For the moment, he chooses to breathe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirt (Klaine Advent Day Four)

Kurt breathes.

The sound echoes from metal door to door through the locker room and back in shallow beats, amplified and sharp in its return. 

It’s been seven minutes since Karofsky ran out of the room, since he forced the air from Kurt’s lungs, and it’s taken every ounce of will to just keep breathing. If he keeps sucking air in and out through bruised lips, he has to believe that he’ll be able to move again. He’ll crawl up from the cold, wet locker room floor, emerge from the darkness, and scream his rage down the hallways of McKinley High. Kurt Hummel will be the sword of vengeance in this sad excuse for a town, but right now, he has to remember how to say his own name without shaking. 

Frozen in the glow of florescent lights, he tucks his back into the corner where locker meets locker and pulls his knees towards his chest. Within the safe circumference of his own body, he holds one shaking hand against his knee and picks at a scab between his thumb and index finger. The digging tips of his nails will draw blood, but some part of Kurt doesn’t care. He wants to remember this feeling, like red blossoming against smooth skin, shining raw between his fingers. He wants to remember the shock of red lips in his reflection and two spots of flush humiliation high on pale cheeks. 

For a minute, as he picks at the open wound, he wonders if this is what being objectified feels like. The girls talk about it sometimes, Rachel and Tina at least. Quinn just narrows her eyes and looks away. Perhaps, he thinks, this is what it would be like to be a  _thing_ , but the thought doesn’t ring true. To be a beautiful, empty object— a marble statue or a pinup calendar— he would have to be whole. He would have to have a beginning, middle and end, and right now he’s in pieces. 

He’s become the fragments formerly known as Kurt.

Kurt is the splash of red on his hand and the locker digging into the right side of his ribcage. He’s the dank odor of chlorinated sweat rising from vacant benches. But most of all, he’s the dirt under Karofsky’s fingernails as they move to cup his trembling face. 

Those hands, those dirty nails, do not belong on  _his skin_ , and yet now they are on him, in him, like invisible brands along the jaw line. He won’t play Lady MacBeth and try to wash away a crime he never committed. Those weren’t his finger nails and it isn’t his fault that he knows what a boy’s lips taste like. Kurt Hummel will not wallow in another man’s self-loathing. But still, the dirt slips in. Just seven minutes and it’s already to his bones, burrowing in beside  _The Sound of Music_  and his mother’s perfume. 

In time, he will get up. 

He will push off of the cold lockers, splash water on his face, and find his phone kicked to the side of the hallway. He will find a message from Blaine, guileless and sincere, and he won’t answer for a while. In time, he will remember that dirt doesn’t doesn’t have to get washed away; it can be fresh ground for deep roots and silent growth, but for now, he just remembers to breathe.


End file.
